Change Your Orientation

Adam Waring explains how an ‘L-bracket’ can help you switch quickly and easily between horizontal and vertical shooting

- Adam Waring

Photographers who make a living from their images often shoot in both landscape and portrait orientation for one reason: it doubles their chances of sales. This is because people buying shots for use in print are often looking for a photo that will fill a single page, which demands that it’s longer on the vertical edge, or to go across two pages, in which case it needs to be longer on the horizontal.

Tripods are primarily designed for shooting horizontally. Once you’ve set up the legs so that your tripod is level, you screw the base plate into the camera and it sits on top, with the camera’s centre of gravity directly above the tripod. To shoot vertically, ball heads have an indent which the attachment to the baseplate slots into, but that means the weight is then off-centre. Worse, the camera has moved to a new position and so we may have to recompose a shot.

When we went to shoot this windmill, overcast conditions meant the sun would only break through the clouds occasionally. We wanted the windmill to be sunlit, but by the time we’d switched orientation and recomposed, it was plunged into shade once again.